PIERCE THE VEIL · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Emergency Contact

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 14-20, 24-26 and 28-30, and 4 more places -- 23.4% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
113 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
106
LENGTH
3:45
DIFFICULTY
52/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 113 BPM
EMERGENCY CONTACT · BAR 15

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 21 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 52 out of 100, so the beat is not the hard part: what costs you is everything around it, the joins and the fills.

How to get it under your hands

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 85 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 3 of them. Nothing is a matter of opinion: each rung has a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next one.

  1. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. This is the part to know by heart.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 85, 99 and 113 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.

PRACTISE THIS BEAT →

Questions

What drum beat does Emergency Contact use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 113 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 23.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 14-20, 24-26, 28-30 and 32-34, and 3 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 13 times over the song.

Is the beat in Emergency Contact hard?

21 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 52 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 106 BARS ANALYSED